Local storage / drives

Drives formatted as FAT, ExFAT or NTFS can be mounted in WSL.
For this example, we assume the drive shows in Windows as F:\
If Windows changes the USB drive letter on a subsequent session, you need to repeat this process.

The commands are typed into the Windows Subsystem for Linux Terminal.

Create a mount location in WSL:

mkdir /mnt/f

Mount the drive in WSL:

mount -t drvfs f: /mnt/f

After this one-time setup, one can create and manipulate files from both Windows and WSL on the same drive.

Some older Prolific-based USB interfaces–such as used to program two-way radios and amateur radios–can fail to be recognized on Windows upon first plugin.
Looking in Windows Device Manager, the device shows up with a yellow caution sign, and an error message like:

Usually the fix is to install an older version of the Prolific driver that is less sensitive to Prolific chip version.
We have experienced that the Prolific 3.6 - 3.8 drivers are subject to this issue.

PyPy allows running Python code up to multiple times faster.
PyPy is particularly suited for heavy “pure Python” workloads.
PyPy does not significantly help for workloads heavy in Numpy array operations, for example.
PyPy is slower to start, so if a program isn’t “big enough”, PyPy can be slower than standard CPython.
PyPy is available for Linux, MacOS and Windows.

Notes

Why Visual C++?

Windows Python needs Visual C++ libraries installed via the SDK to build code, such as via setuptools.extension.Extension or numpy.distutils.core.Extension.
For example, building
f2py
modules in Windows with Python requires Visual C++ SDK as installed above.
On Linux and Mac, the C++ libraries are installed with the compiler.

Reference

This was the former link to Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools–no longer active:
https://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

Travis-CI switches to
default Ubuntu 16.04
as of April 23, 2019.
This change was long overdue, but at least didn’t take as long as their default switch to Ubuntu 14.04 from 12.04, which was almost scandalous in how long it took.
Travis-CI has many strengths, but one of its weaknesses is their out of date Ubuntu configurations.
We have been doing some tasks in AppVeyor alone for some time, since
Ubuntu 18.04 has been available on AppVeyorimage: ubuntu1804 since September 2018.